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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 17, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Music can change the way your brain behaves, it can change moods, it can bring people together, Inspire and comfort us. Tyrants often fear the songwriters more than the rebel soldiers, as songs have toppled unjust regimes.

Call to Worship
-By Roberto Juarroz

The bell is full of wind 
though it does not ring. 
The bird is full of flight though it is still. 
The sky is full of clouds though it is alone. 
The world is full of voice 
though no one speaks it.
Everything is full of fleeing 
though there are no roads. 

Everything is fleeing 
toward its presence. 

Reading

WHERE EVERYTHING IS MUSIC
-By Rumi

Don’t worry about saving these songs! 
And if one of our instruments breaks, 
it doesn’t matter. 
We have fallen into the place 
where everything is music. 
The strumming and the flute notes 
rise into the atmosphere, 
and even if the whole world’s harp 
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing. 
So the candle flickers and goes out. 
We have a piece of flint, and a-spark:
This singing art is sea foam. 
The graceful movements come from a pearl 
somewhere on the ocean floor. 
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge 
of driftwood along the beach, wanting! 
They derive 
from a slow and powerful root 
that we can’t see. 
Stop the words now. 
Open the window in the centre of your chest, 
and let the spirits fly in and out. 

Sermon

Have you ever looked at your house, thought “This place needs cleaning!” and put on your go-to house-cleaning music? It’s upbeat, it gets you in the mood to move around and get some things done. Or you go to work out and feel sluggish, but then you turn on your music and you feel strong, ready and willing to do what needs to be done? Music changes our mood. It can change our consciousness too. Some rhythms entrance us, change our brain waves, even our heart beats. Cultures around the world have ancient traditions of drumming, dancing and chanting for healing and guidance. 

When we are inside our mothers’ bodies, we hear the rhythm of her heart beat, the swoosh of her blood through the uterine artery. We can hear voices through the uterine wall, voices we can recognize when we get out into the air. We respond to music before we are born. Some music will set a baby kicking, some will soothe.

Mickey Hart, who was the drummer for the Grateful Dead, has become more and more involved in studying the relationship between drumming in a group and a return to well-being. He has funded drum therapy for the child soldiers in Sierra Leone, to return them to wholeness after their drugged killing sprees. Drum circles for at-risk kids in the U.S. and for Alzheimer’s patients and other elderly folks seem to have a good effect. Here is some of what he said in his testimony before the US Senate on the issue:

“What is true for our own bodies is true almost everywhere we look. We are embedded within a rhythmical universe. Everywhere we see rhythm, patterns moving through time. It is there in the cycles of the seasons, in the migration of the birds and animals, in the fruiting and withering of plants, and in the birth, maturation and death of ourselves. Rhythm is at the very center of our lives. By acknowledging this fact and acting on it, our potential for preventing illness and maintaining mental, physical and spiritual well-being is far greater.

People who work in music therapy know that music stays with a person even after they have lost language. Stroke patients who have trouble speaking can often sing with more ease than they speak. People with dementia can remember the words to songs that are important to them, or they light up when they hear music from the time in their lives when they were young. One patient in the documentary The Music Instinct said, (with a strong Brooklyn accent) “Once you get it in your head it stays there.”

Music literally touches us. It makes rhythmic waves in the air that move our eardrums. We don’t only hear through ear drums, but through our bones. When we speak to another person our sound touches them inside their ear. Our words touch their bones. It behooves us to remember this as we speak to one another. One physicist in the movie talked about the tiny string in the center of all particles of matter that can vibrate. Is there a vibration at the heart of all matter?

A baby is born with a brain that grows to understand the music of their part of the world. Some music has harmonies, and those are important, so we hear notes which go together to our ear, Some Chinese and Indian classical music doesn’t rely as much on harmony as on more linear melodies that use many more notes than Western music uses, quarter tones that my ear would not be able to name. When I use a quarter tone, it’s because I didn’t quite hit the note I was going for. Rhythms are much more complex in Indian and African music. African music can use a complex layering of rhythms that don’t necessarily fit the way I was raised to listen for rhythm. Indian rhythm makes all kinds of sense to me because my mother grew up in India and was a fan of the table, and she played that music for us. Our culture is arrogant in ways that we are blind to. For example, in college, in the music department, you are going to likely be studying western music. If you want to study Latin, African, Indian, Chinese music, you are suddenly in the ethnomusicology department. That’s a strange separation, as music is music.

I’m sure as soon as people realize that’s kind of racist they will change right away. 

Scientists are studying how the brain is laid out for music, with the cilia in your ears sending electrical impulses to a place on the cortex that’s like a keyboard. Other place in the brain receive the impulses for rhythm, other places for timbre, like is this note a horn or a voice, yet other places for volume and tempo. When they use magnetic resonance imagery, the whole brain lights up when the person is listening to music.. For people with musical training, other places light up too, the places where the hearer is analyzing the music or thinking how they would write out the parts they are hearing. Kids with musical training process not only music better, but language as well. Language and music, they think, are different functions, but with some overlap. They say 75 percent of communication is non verbal. We have all been in discussions where the words “It wasn’t what you said, it was your tone” were spoken. Many languages and dialects are tonal. In the South, language is tonal. You can tell how women at a party feel about each other by the swoop of the call “HEY!” The higher it goes, the less they like each other. You can tell by how someone says “yes” whether it means yes or no. And you can tell, if you have attuned ears, exactly where in the wide range of meanings that “bless your heart” lies.

Now, let’s talk about the breath. The word for “breath” and the word for “Spirit” in the Hebrew language are the same: “ruach.” The breath, the spirit, moves into and out of us, that same breath that circulates through the leaves of the trees and the lungs of the badgers and skunks, it’s something we share. The next most basic element of singing together is the breath being drawn in, given a sound and a shape, and coming out of our bodies. It’s transformation, shape-shifting, magic.

First let’s breathe with our mouths open. If you can be comfortable, please now open them as wide as you can. Now sigh. Again. Now we are going to make a sound with our sigh. Now let’s stop the sigh on a note. Don’t worry about it being pretty. That’s singing! Even if you just do that, it’s energizing. 

Music is magic in that it affects more than one brain at a time. You’ve been at Austin City Limits or South by Southwest where there is a field of people moving and singing together. You are having a shared experience. You see other people’s feelings and you imagine that you all are feeling together. Soldiers marching have a rhythm, and sing marching songs, which entrain their brain waves and knit them together as one body. Protesters sing protest songs, and the power of the music can strengthen them. I hope you all know some stories from the Children’s March in 1963, where organizers asked teenagers and even children to be very brave, to be trained in the tactics of non-violence, and march together for Civil Rights. On May 3, the children walked out of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, in groups singing “Freedom…” Bull Connor and his men were out there ready to arrest them and take them to jail. A thousand children between 14 and 17 were arrested that day, and more the next day. Connor turned fire hoses on the children, who sat down and hunched their backs and sang “Freedom….” In South Africa, protesters against Apartheid danced the Toyi Toyi and sang, raising and expressing power, strength and a common bond.

For UUs, as a community, singing in a group is a non-verbal reminder that, even though we are individuals, we are also members of a community and we all choose to come together to do something in concert, to act or think or feel something together that is a needed addition to those things we feel on our own. Look around the room. All of these people each chose this morning to come be here to be with you and me, to see what happens, to feel what happens, to find something, to experience a connection with mind, with body, with spirit. We have our differences, and they matter, and we have commonalities, which also matter. We wrestle with justice, we take our mission seriously, though it’s difficult and demands discomfort and resilience. And we can sing together. And listen together. And our bones can vibrate together. And that can make us strong.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776 

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 10, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Wynton Marsalis, in his book “To A Young Jazz Musician: Letters From The Road”, talks about the philosophy of the Blues, how it both expressed and healed the lives of black people as they lived in a society which was structured to marginalize them. How do we learn from the Blues to express suffering, to face it, and to build and celebrate resilience?

Reading

THE STREET
by Ann Petry

(About Billie Holiday) Her voice had a thin thread of sadness running through it that made the song important. That made it tell a story that wasn’t in the words. A story of dispair, of loneliness, of frustration. It was a story that all of them knew by heart, that they had always known because they learned it soon after they were born and would go on adding to it until the day they died.

Sermon

Ok, what is a white woman doing talking about the blues? That’s my identity, and I put it out there right here at the beginning. I’m not a Blues expert, but I love listening to the blues, and I wanted to learn from the Blues and talk to you about what I’m learning.

It’s a cliche that ‘all blues starts “woke up this morning.” ‘ this meant more than ‘I opened my eyes in bed as the sun came up.’ Here is what the singers and the listeners, at least at the beginning of the Blues in the South, knew was the meaning of the words:

“I woke up this morning knowing that in half an hour I’ll be pushing a massive plow behind a stubborn mule or bending over to hoe weeds, and I’ll be doing that until it’s too dark to see. And tomorrow and the next day and the next day, I’ll do it again, until, most likely, I work until I die, broke, just like my parents and grandparents. But right now I’m dancing.”

The Blues talk about real life. They tell the truth, even if in coded language, and the expression is true. If, as Keats says, truth is beauty, then the Blues are beautiful. The sadness is beautiful when it’s true. 

Ralph Ellison said that ‘the blues is an impulse to keep painful details and episodes of brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain.’

The blues are the voice of an oppressed and alienated people. The blues has always provided a unique way to ‘find one’s voice’ and to attest to the hardships of life in a way that draws others in rather than turning them away . Your friend might say to you “My Baby cheated on me. It has changed the way I feel about them. My love has been diminished, and I wonder whether I should break up with them, because if I do, I won’t have anyone.”

OR your friend could sing The thrill is gone

The thrill is gone away
The thrill is gone baby
The thrill is gone away
You know you done me wrong baby
And you’ll be sorry someday
The thrill is gone
It’s gone away from me
The thrill is gone baby
The thrill is gone away from me
Although, I’ll still live on
But so lonely I’ll be
The thrill is gone

– BB King

The music can capture the pain of life, and the massive scale of exposure to painful trauma, loss, and adversity associated with enduring the humiliation and brutality of slavery and its transition to sharecropping. After slavery came the way its legacy was built into the culture, with Jim Crow laws, enforced through lynchings beatings and the KKK’s terrorism. Extreme poverty and harsh lives on the streets, and frequent arrest, incarceration, and the experience of prison road gangs, compounded by devastating and uprooting natural disasters (including droughts, floods, and hurricanes) perpetuated the pain.

Its musical expression followed the massive displacement of large populations from the plantations of the South to Northern cities such as Chicago, and later incorporated the experience of black soldiers returning after World War II and the Vietnam War. In this way, the blues served to hold and document memories, create a sense of community, and provide a platform to share their visceral impact with others.

Research done at Mt Sinai Hospital has shown that trauma makes changes in DNA, and this trauma, the PTSD, can be passed on through subsequent generations. These genetic changes can cause depression, differences in ways of regulating emotions, being wired to see threat and tragedy. This is what our government has set in motion by separating children from their parents on the border. The very DNA has been affected, and brains were re-wired.

The blues to create a shared narrative, a story that the system of white culture constantly tries to erase. You hear people say “We’re a nation of immigrants,” and they are lovely people, but they “forget” that 12 million African teachers, mothers, fathers, children, medicine people, farmers and merchants were captured and dragged to the Americas in chains.

About 350,000 were brought to the 13 colonies, and the rest were sold to the sugar plantations in the Carribean and Brazil. You hear politicians even today say “America was built on freedom and enterprise,” erasing the fact that the labor of enslaved men and women was a big engine of the American economy. There was even an article in Forbes Magazine a couple of years ago laying all of this out. To have the story of your people ignored and erased makes you feel crazy and angry, and the retelling of these stories can strengthen solidarity among the people, reminding them that they are being affected by these traumas, and that a lot of what happens has roots in the history that the culture around them is working hard on forgetting.

There are ongoing arguments about whether people who don’t live their lives as Black Americans can authentically sing the blues. The blues have a form, so anyone can technically play. 4/4 time, 12 measures, a blues scale. They are also an expression, though, of trauma and pain. Almost all people have trauma and pain, some say, and you express that through the blues.

“I am not maintaining that only African-Americans should be allowed to perform the blues. The point is only that blues authenticity depends upon group membership. While cultural outsiders can sing the blues, it should be understood that what is being sung in these cases is a variant of a cultural expression derived from a very different kind of experience”.

– Philip Jenkins

I was doing some learning about this last week. In my southern culture, the way we deal with bad things happening is that we ignore it or we refer to it in a vague way. And we move on. Well, there is a big lump under the rug, but we step over it. Sometimes we trip over it. “What’s wrong with Aunt Clara?” Well, she married a Catholic.” Whispered. I heard a whisper that one of my cousins had cancer, but then, when I asked about it, I got just vagueness. I’ve done this myself here, because I got here after the church had a big trauma. They had dismissed the minister, who was a controversial figure from the beginning. (I’m nervous talking about this because there are still folks here whose feelings about that time run high.) Anyway, no one was really talking about it when I got here. Being a family therapist by training, I knew talking about it needed to happen. I started calling it “The Troubles.”

This week, though, I had a couple of conversations about restorative justice, where, when a mistake happens, where damage is done, the thing that caused the damage needs to be named. You may have heard that a year ago we invited a man named Fidel to come do a program about the Water Protectors. He claimed he would bring some Native friends to do a ceremony. We did our due diligence, we checked his references, his social media, all good. Then he came, and brought an insulting and shallow program that lasted too long, and instead of Native friends to lead us through a ritual, he had a white lady who sang what sounded like fake Native songs. When some of our guests from the Indigenous community spoke up, toward the end of the thing, Fidel treated them dismissively. Harm was done to the Indigenous community and to the relationship between this congregation and the Indigenous community in Austin.

“Say the words,” the church member said to me. I told her I would think about that, but it was hard to figure out what she meant. I asked Jules what she thought that meant. She said “saying the words, naming the thing that did damage, is a way of letting everyone in the conversation know that you haven’t forgotten what happened. It lets people trust that you aren’t trying to sweep something under the rug. It is a way of bringing your history with you into conversations with people who may not be “over it” yet, who may not be ready or able to “move on.”

The Blues are about saying the words, repeating the words because repeated telling is how people process trauma. You shout and cry, confess and complain, all to a party dancing beat. You can dance and grieve, shout out your pain, all at the same time, if you want. The shouting comes from the field shouts, back and forth, singing in coded language while doing the back breaking work of hoeing or picking cotton. Talking about a mean woman taking all your money, when you really mean the boss man who is mean and takes all your money. The Blues scale has flatted notes and minor notes which express sadness, and bent notes, quarter tones, which don’t appear in Western classical music, but are all over classical African, Middle Eastern, and Asian music. The note which is not quite the note, and then resolves into what our ear was expecting, creates a tension and then a release of the tension that is part of the healing.

Saying the words, repeating the words, creating tension then relieving tension, all to a dance beat, within a structure that frees you to create within it, those are ways of healing trauma.

People from many cultures can learn from the Blues, and I think sitting at the feet of these artists, this music, can teach us. In the culture in which I was raised, it is shameful to struggle, shameful to be traumatized. We try not to speak of it, or we speak of it in whispers. Speaking your trauma in this midst of a positive life? My people don’t know how to do that.

Speak of the trauma. Speak it as many times as you need to. Put it into a structure that helps contain the sorrow, and tell your truth about it. If you can put it to a beat that lets you know you can be sorrowful and dance at the same time, that is amazing. The healing doesn’t mean the history goes away. It means you have a group of people who can listen to what happened and dance with you because you share the suffering.

What history do we in this church, and as members of the UU denomination, need to speak about and bring with us? How has the Unitarian movement and the Universalist movement attracted and then driven away so many among us who are black and brown over the past 100 years. The mix is a lot whiter now than it was years ago, and there are reasons for that. We have some work to do “Saying the words.”

“Living is a positive experience. That’s what the blues teaches you. That’s why it continues to exist. And that’s why it’s in so much music. Yeah, all of this tragic stuff happened to you, but you’re still here. And you can still express being here with style. Like laughing to keep from crying. And you keep dancing, man….

– Wynton Marsalis

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776

PODCASTS

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 3, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Join us for an All Ages service to bless the beloved animal companions in your lives. All friendly, well-behaved creatures young, old, great and small, furry and scaly are invited to this cherished annual tradition.

Call to Worship

THE CALLING OF THE CREATURES
By Ian W. Riddell

Come hoof and trunk and tail and horn
and paw and wing and claw;
Come bird and reptile, mammal born
all full of nature’s law.
Bring bark and crow and ribbit, too
and silent stare and hiss;
Bring purr and trill and warble, too
and voice no ear can miss.
We gather here each life and all
to celebrate and sing
to honor creature large and small
‘Tis holiness we bring.

Reading

WE GIVE THANKS FOR THE ANIMALS
By Gary Kowalski

We give thanks for the animals
Who live close to nature,
Who remind us of the sanctities of birth and death,
Who do not trouble their lives with foreboding or grief,
Who let go each moment as it passes,
And accept each new one as it comes
With serenity and grace.
Enable us to walk in beauty as they do
At one with the turning seasons,
Welcoming the sunrise and at peace with sunset.
And as we hallow the memory of good friends now departed,
Who loved abundantly and in their time were loved,
Who freely gave us their affection and loyalty.
Let us not be anxious for tomorrow
But ask only that kindness and gratitude fill our hearts,
Day by day, into the passing years.

Sermon

There is a love holding us.

There is so much love in this room. A woman’s husband had a dog he called “the keeper of his soul.” One night she idly asked him whether, if he had to choose between the dog and her, which he would choose. “Please don’t ask me that,” he said.

There is a love holding all that we love.

You heard me talk about the bear that was my friend since birth. He was a good companion. What makes a good companion was in a publication called “Yoga World” that I saw a wonderful description of how to be a good companion. Sometimes an animal can be this to a human, sometimes a human can be this to an animal. Sometimes we can find this with another human. To be a good companion, it says,

“You will need to be caring and concerned about [their] happiness. As a friend, you will want to share [their] concerns and labors. Naturally, you will want to make [their] life more pleasant. You will have to know life and yourself well enough to become trustworthy, capable of keeping your agreements. To be a friend, your word must be true. A true friend, you will hold good will in your heart even when you misunderstand or distrust your gracious companion. You will refuse to indulge bad moods brought on by your inadequacies. It is not easy to be a true friend. “

May we all find a being like this is our lives. May we sometimes be able to be a friend like this ourselves, to another being. Our job here on earth is to learn how to love and be loved. As our animal companions teach us those things, we are grateful to them.

SERMON SONG
There is a love holding us.
There is a love holding all that we love.
There is a love holding all
We rest in this love.

There is a love holding all….

Last week my wife and I were talking about ancestors, teachers and helpers who had been good to us in our lives. I was thinking about a woman named Polly who taught me a lot about dreams and how to interpret them. She trained me using my own dreams, and we talked about my life. I was sad sometimes, during those talks. She had an enormous dog, a Bernese Mountain dog named Riggi. When he would sense I was sad, he would get up from the floor and come lean on my knee. Sometimes when someone is sad, it is not any words you say that make them feel better. It’s your presence with them, just giving a hug or leaning against their shoulder that makes them feel better. I learned that from Riggi, and so I count that huge dog as one of my teachers.

Animal companions help people and people help their animal companions. We are going to bless them today because they bless us. UU theology says that all of us are able to bless, and that all of us are ministers in our own way. That’s why we don’t bring our animals up for just the ministers to bless. You can bless your own animal. We are going to use the blessing song that we’ve been singing, only we’re going to put the names of the ones we want to bless into the song.

Like this:  
There is a love holding us. 
There is a love holding all that we love. 
There is a love holding all.
_________ in this love.

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below or copying and pasting this link. https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776 

PODCASTS

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 24, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Readings and carols, candlelight on Christmas Eve. One of the church community’s favorite services of the year.

Introit: “In the Bleak Midwinter” (Harold Darke)
Katrina Saporsantos, soprano

Chalice Lighting:

Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law; this is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.

Opening Words

The Persian poet Rumi wrote, 
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box 
From cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. 
As roses, up from ground. 
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, 
Now a cliff covered with vines, 
Now a horse being saddled. 
(God’s joy) hides within these, 
Till one day it cracks them open. 

Anthem: “Someday at Christmas” (Ron Miller and Bryan Wells)
Katrina Saporsantos, soprano

Reading: “Come into Christmas” by Ellen Fay

It is the winter season of the year 
Dark and chilly 
Perhaps it is a winter season in your life. 
Dark and chilly there, too 
Come in to Christmas here, 
Let the light and warmth of Christmas brighten our 
lives and the world. 
Let us find in the dark corners of our souls the 
light of hope, 
A vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Let us find rest in the quiet of a holy moment to 
find promise and renewal. 
Let us find the child in each of us, the new hope, 
the new light, born in us. 
Then will Christmas come 
Then will magic return to the world. 

Reading: “The Shortest Day” by Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died, 
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world 
Came people singing, dancing, 
To drive the dark away. 
They lighted candles in the winter trees; 
They hung their homes with evergreen; 
They burned beseeching fires all night long 
To keep the year alive, 
And when the New year’s sunshine blazed awake 
They shouted, reveling. 
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them 
Echoing behind us – Listen!! 
All the long echoes sing the same delight, 
This shortest day, 
As promise wakens in the sleeping land: 
They carol, fest, give thanks, 
And dearly love their friends, 
And hope for peace. 
And so do we, here, now, 
This year and every year. 
Welcome Yule! 

Reading: “On Angels” by Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses, 
wings, even existence. 
Yet I believe you, 
messengers. 
There, where the world is turned inside out, 
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts, 
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams. 
Short is your stay here: 
now and then at a morning hour, if the sky is clear, 
in a melody repeated by a bird, 
or in the smell of apples at close of day 
when the light makes the orchards magic. 
They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing 
for the humans invented themselves as well. 
The voice – no doubt it is a valid proof, 
as it can belong only to radiant creatures, 
weightless and winged (after all, why not?), 
girdled with the lightning. 
I have heard that voice many a time when asleep 
and, what is strange, 
I understood more or less 
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue: 
day draws near 
another one 
do what you can. 

Reading: Luke 2: 1-7 

Reading: by Anthony F. Perrino

A gentle kind of Gladness 
Comes with the end of December 
A winter solstice spell, perhaps, 
When people forget to remember – 

The drab realities of fact, 
The cherished hurt of ancient wrongs, 
The lonely comfort of being deaf 
To human sighs and angels’ songs. 

Suddenly, they lose their minds 
To hearts’ demands and beauty’s grace; 
And deeds extravagant with love 
Give glory to the commonplace. 
Armies halt their marching, 
Hatreds pause in strange regard 
For the sweet and gentle madness born 
when a winery sky was starred. 

Reading: “Each Night A Child Is Born” by Sophia Lyon Fahs

For so the children come 
and so they have been coming. 
Always in the same way they came-
Born of the seed of man and woman. 

No angels herald their beginnings. 
No prophets predict their future courses. 
no wise man see a star to show where to find 
The babe that will save humankind. 
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night. 
Fathers and mothers 
Sitting beside their children’s cribs- 
Feel glory in the sight of a new beginning. 
They ask “Where and how will this new life end? 
Or will it ever end?” 

Each night a child is horn is a holy night-
A time for singing- 
A time for wondering 
A time for worshipping. 

Reading: Luke 2: 8-14 

Reading: “In this Night” by Dorothee Solle 

In this night the stars left their habitual places 
And kindled wildfire tidings 
that spread faster than sound. 

In this night the shepherds left their posts 
To shout the new slogans 
into each other’s clogged ears. 
In this night the foxes left their warm burrows 
and the lion spoke with deliberation, 
“This is the end revolution” 

In this night roses fooled the earth 
And began to bloom in snow. 

Reading: Luke 2: 15-20 

Reading: “The Camels Speak” by Lynn Ungar

Of course they never consulted us.
They were wise men, kings, star-readers,
and we merely transportation.
They simply loaded us with gifts
and turned us toward the star.
I ask you, what would a king know
of choosing presents for a child?
Had they ever even seen a baby
born to such simple folks,
so naked of pretension,
so open to the wind?
What would such a child care
for perfumes and gold? Far better
to have asked one born in the desert,
tested by wind and sand. We saw
what he would need: the gift
of perseverance, of continuing on the hard way,
making do with what there is,
living on what you have inside.
The gift of holding up under a burden,
of lifting another with grace, of kneeling
to accept the weight of what you must bear.
Our footsteps could have rocked him
with the rhythms of the road,
shown him comfort in a harsh land,
the dignity of continually moving forward.
But the wise men were not
wise enough to ask. They simply
left their trinkets and admired
the rustic view. Before you knew it
we were turned again toward home,
carrying men only half-willing
to be amazed. But never mind.
We saw the baby, felt him reach
for the bright tassels of our gear.
We desert amblers have our ways
of seeing what you chatterers must miss.
That child at heart knows something
about following a star. Our gifts are given.
Have no doubt. His life will bear
the print of who we are.

Anthem: “Still, Still, Still” (Austrian Folk Song) 
Katrina Saporsantos, soprano

Reading: “A Ritual of the Winter Solstice Fire,” by Rev. Meg Barnhouse

Let us take into our hands a Christmas candle, a Solstice candle 
this is a night of ancient joy and ancient fear 
those who have gone before us were fearful of what lurked 
outside the ring of fire, of light and warmth. 
As we light this fire we ask that the fullness of its flame 
protect each of us from what we fear most 
and guide us towards our perfect light and joy. 

May we each be encircled by the fire and warmth of love 
and by the flame of our friendship with one another. 
On this night, it was the ancient custom to exchange gifts 
of light, symbolic of the new light of the sun. 

Therefore make ready for the light! 
Light of star, light of candle, 
Firelight, lamplight, love light
Let us share the gift of light. 

Candle Lighting: “Payapang Daigdig” (Felipe Padilla de Leon) 
Katrina Saporsantos, soprano

Reading: “The Work of Christmas” by Howard Thurman 

When the song of angels is stilled, 
When the star in the sky is gone, 
When the kings and princes are home, 
When shepherds are back with their flock, 
The work of Christmas begins: 
to find the lost, 
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry, 
to release the prisoner, 
to rebuild the nations, 
to bring peace among the brothers, 
to make music in the heart. 

Carol: “We wish You a Merry Christmas” 

Closing Words: “Kneeling in Bethlehem” by Ann Weems

It is not over, this birthing. 
There are always newer skies 
into which God can throw stars. 
When we begin to think 
that we can predict the Advent of God, 
that we can box the Christ in a stable in Bethlehem, 
that’s just the time that God will be born 
in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe. 
Those who wait for God 
watch with their hearts and not their eyes, 
listening, always listening for angel words. 

Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.

SERMON INDEX

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them by clicking on the podcast link below. 

PODCASTS

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 16, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Everybody else’s life looks glowy and great. How do they do it? Perfectionism can really get its claws into us at this time of year. We compare our insides with other people’s outsides and it makes us feel bad. How can we see beneath the surface, grow our roots, and strengthen our core?

Reading

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life,… I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Sermon

It’s natural to want to put yourself out there in the most positive light. No one writes Holiday letters saying things like “We’ve been fighting a lot. My business isn’t doing too well. One of the kids dropped out of school and I think one is in some sort of a gang. The dog is still making messes behind the couch. It’s driving me crazy …. ” We like to present cheer and stability and success if we can. 

I joined Instagram, a social media platform, because it’s where the pictures of my family appear. 

You choose certain people to follow, so you can peek in on the parts of their lives they choose to share. Smiling on the streets of NYC, sunsets in La Jolla, Delicious looking food, concerts, parties, celebrations. All of that is lovely. Then you have the “influencers,” people who have gathered or purchased loads of followers in hopes of getting someone to pay them to put ads on their feed. One sylphlike blonde woman poses on her perfect bed in her perfect bedroom in soft pink pajamas. There is an untouched plate of strawberry pancakes beside her. “Strawberry pancakes,” she comments, “the perfect start to a busy day.” I think the odds of her being a pancake eating person are small, but you can’t always tell. What takes this to another place, though, is that she has tied eight or ten shiny pink heart shaped balloons to the pillows, so she’s surrounded by party radiance. 

Really? For breakfast? Who does that? Who believes that? Who would think that is the way you’re supposed to do breakfast? There is a full bottle of Listerine on her bedside table, so they paid for that. I guess some people keep their mouthwash on the bedside table… 

Social media is grand in many ways, because it’s supposed to connect people. I love it because it’s like reading a hometown newspaper where I know all the people in the stories. When you have friends all over the place, it’s a good way to keep in touch. Instagram, though, has filters you can use to make everything look homey, or glowing, or extra sharp and saturated, so your own life looks dull in comparison. Other people’s children look angelic and their partners have loving faces. Their trips appear festive and their bodies look pain-free. Mental health experts are now fretting that scrolling through these windows into other people’s perfect looking lives creates shame and depression about your own all-too-real experiences. 

There is nothing wrong with presenting your life in the most positive way, but it behooves all scrollers to understand that this is what is happening. Some people get bitten by the fake perfection bug, and then they feel they must manufacture their own staged perfection, and make ourselves sick by presenting that. In fact, there is a web site called LifeFaker.com where you can buy packages of photos of parties, friends, travel and food to make your life look as good as the others on the platform. 

We can get bitten by the perfectionism bug all by ourselves without Instagram though. We have ideas about how we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to know, the books we should have read, the thoughts we should understand and agree with. We see and admire other people, but, as the 12 step program people say, we are comparing our insides to their outsides.

Some people won’t do anything they aren’t already good at. I’ve told you about my mom and her violin. She practiced every morning from 6:00 to 7:OO before going to work as a second grade teacher. She never got much better, but she loved it. I’m glad she didn’t get shamed into stopping just because she wasn’t good at it. It brought her joy. And scratchy strings were my morning wake up alarm. 

Some people fear mistakes so much that it makes them procrastinate, doing things finally under such pressure and with so little time that there will always be a reason for whatever it is to be less than perfect. That perfection is unattainable and unrealistic is something we already know, but all the staged pictures and the filters that make things look gentler or more real than reality continue working on us. We collect pictures on Pinterest of beautiful gardens, doorways, water features, clothes, jewelry, cakes, muffins, parties, etc. It’s so over the top that there is now a balancing site called “Pinterest fails.” You see the perfect photo from Pinterest, then you see a photo of how the cake actually turned out, or how the do-it-yourself project actually turned out. I bet there already is an Instagram balance site where people show the grittier realities of their lives, but I haven’t found it yet. 

Many of us don’t try to have a perfect life with strawberry pancakes on a bed made with snowy linen, pink heart balloons attached to our pillows. Our perfectionism comes in feeling ashamed that we aren’t better justice warriors, that we haven’t read that book everyone else is quoting, that we aren’t loving enough or intellectual enough. Forget the pink balloons, we want to have read and understood everything, to make scintillating conversation, to make meaningful days. 

Perfectionism is cunning, baffling and powerful. It waits around every corner. We have been raised within the air of our culture. We tend to focus on what is wrong with our work and the work of others, we have an easy time naming and describing what went wrong in a situation and it’s harder to name what went right. We hear things like “why should I thank them for just doing their job?” Thanking is one antidote to this culture of perfectionism. Practicing naming what went well, what is good in a situation or in a job of work. In Perfectionism culture, mistakes are personal. You making a mistake is almost the same thing as you being a mistake. We push back against this culture by being interested in mistakes, by being curious about mistakes, by taking time to reflect by ourselves and with others about how we can learn from mistakes, and then by forgiving ourselves and others for their mistakes, having the resilience to move on rather than crumple up and throw ourselves away. 

This is a hard time for so many among us. Some are joyous, and others are rattling, dry and hollow. It doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong if your house is lovely and your food is beautiful and your family is well behaved, and it doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong if your reality is harder. There is a lot of pain in this world. Pain in the war zones and pain at our own border. Pain in our cities and pain in the farmlands. If we can fill our lives with thank yous, with appreciation of the good, with doing small good things for the people around us and far away, we grow love. We don’t ignore the pain, and we don’t ignore the goodness. We celebrate the darkest time of the year, we embrace the return of the light at the same time that we grieve the losses in our own families and the death of a 7 year old Jakelin Caal Maquin in US custody. Creation and destruction, intertwined, goodness and corruption, hope and despair. That is our gorgeous terrible world. 

It’s our weak spots that give other people a place to hold on to us. The cracks are where the light comes in, as the poet Leonard Cohen says. The cracks are where the light comes in. 

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here. 

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
Rev. Chris Jimmerson and Jules Jaramillo
December 2, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Meg, Chris, Jules, and Brent will be live-streaming from Meg’s house while you worship from your own cozy spot of choice since the church building is closed with no entry until Saturday, December 8th. We will be talking about mystery, family, and whatever else comes up as you call in on the live-stream page.

Call to Worship

THE FEAST OF LIGHTS
Emma Lazarus

Kindle the taper like the steadfast star
Ablaze on evening’s forehead o’er the earth,
And add each night a lustre till afar
An eightfold splendor shine above thy hearth
Clash, Israel, the cymbals, touch the lyre,
Blow the brass trumpet and the harsh-tongued horn;
Chant psalms of victory till the heart take fire,
The Maccabean spirit leap new-born.

Reading

C. JoyBell

“I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.”

Reading

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is the history of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst it destroys our capacity to do domething. If we remember those times and places, and there are so many, where people have behaved magnificantly this gives us the energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act in however small way we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinate succession of presents and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvel.

Text of this sermon is not available. Click the play button to listen.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 11, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As Thanksgiving approaches, let us talk about gratitude in the midst of difficult circumstances.

Call to Worship
Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Writings to Young Women”

As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness — just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.

Meditation reading
Sharad Vivek Sagar

Let’s be grateful to all those who came in before us. Grateful to all those men and women, young and old alike, who paved the path forward for us, brick by brick. To those men and women who marched across the bridge in Sehna on that great day, those men and ,vornefi who rallied behind the Gandhis and the Maficrelas eVery single time they were needed, to those men and women who stood up for voting rights and civil rights and gay rights and equality and justice and a free world, those men and women who invented the future by inventing things that fundamentally changed the world from the electricity to vaccinations, from airplanes to birth control pills, from the printing press to the internet. 

Sermon

Sometimes, around the Holidays, your soul just gets tired. You’re excited, yes, happy that all the Hallmark holiday movies are starting up, or entering into the Little Drummer Boy contest, where the person who goes the longest without hearing that song, but you can also feel irritable and tense, nothing looks fun, you can’t think. When your soul is getting sick, it’s time to dust off your spiritual practice. Not that you dust it off just when you are sliding into a sink full of the dirty dishwater of despair, but that’s as good a time as any.

A lot of people on Facebook are practicing gratitude by naming one thing they’re thankful for each day. I really like reading those posts. Gratitude is one of my favorite spiritual practices. It doesn’t require equipment, and it’s so simple that you don’t really have to feel guilty if you forget it for a couple of weeks and pick it back up. When I stop to think about what I’m grateful for, it brings me into the present moment. We suffer sometimes when we live in the past with the things that hurt us or our family, and when we live in the future with all of the bad things that may happen.

Most spiritual teachers urge us to stay in the present moment as much as we can, and to fill our minds with the things that are good, and the people who are good. It’s easy these days to get addicted to outrage, and it’s all appropriate, but it strengthens me to better deal with the outrageous events if I hold on to my spirit, and gratitude helps me do that. That is the purpose of a spiritual practice: to build your resilience, to make your spirit sturdy so you are not as easily knocked off balance. When I think about balance, I think about the martial arts training I had years ago that taught me I was harder to knock over if I kept my center of gravity low. To me this means not trying to live up here in my head more than I live in my heart and my gut. It means not having to be perfect in all things, which makes you brittle and defensive. It means having the humility to get peaceful with saying “I could be wrong.” It means being okay with learning from other people, and with leaning on other people. It you can’t be wrong, and if you hate to be helped, you are more of a pain to everyone around you. People who are grateful are easier and more fun to help. Their center of gravity is lower because they are reminding themselves that they are not doing all of this by themselves, that they have help, that they are not alone. Gratitude trains our habits of attention.

Habits of attention are your go-to things to notice in a situation. Some people can go to a nice restaurant and only remember the loud couple at the table nearby Ð they gave them their whole experience. Some people can go on a drive and hold on to the guy who cut them off in traffic, fuming and missing all the beauty and fresh air. Some people look out a window at a gorgeous autumn day and say “Oh my goodness, this window needs cleaning!” We need to notice these things, we need folks who can clock what’s not working well in a system, but it has to be balanced with a habit of noticing goodness and beauty. And being grateful for it.

Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart says if you only ever said “thank you” as a prayer, it would be a good prayer life.

Cicero, born about a century before Rabbi Jesus, wrote: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others,” he said. By the 18th century, the free-market thinker Adam Smith, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” supposed that people who did not feel gratitude were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life. And in the 19th century, Immanuel Kant described ingratitude with “the essence of vileness.”

We certainly don’t want to participate in the “essence of vileness,” so let’s take a moment to think about something for which we are grateful. Now take another deep breath and try to feel it in addition to thinking it. ….

One of the things the board of trustees does here is write thank you notes to volunteers who have helped hold up the sky here at First UU. It’s fun to sit around thinking about the events that have been brought to the community, the people who help with fixing things and chairing ministry teams and helping with our sanctuary work, people who go to meetings and reach out to other organizations in town and who visit with Alirio and who decorate for Thanksgiving Dinner here which is happening on Thursday at 3:00 and people who teach the children and some who teach adults and people who coordinate justice work and welcome folks who come to the church or call on weekdays. So many people do so much, and its nice to think about them with the board and then write and sign notes to them. It feels good.

Now I’m going to ask you to breathe together with me for a moment and think of a person who has helped you, a teacher, a mentor, a friend, a supporter, someone who made a difference in your life. I’m going to invite you, if you have a phone with you, or if you want to write it on your oos, to make a thank you note right now to them. If they are still living, you might want to send it. If not, it will do the universe some good anyway for you to write it. You are welcome to write while I’m talking. It will not hurt my feelings. It will make me happy.

In the Jewish scriptures, in the book of Proverbs (17:22) it says “A merry heart does good like a medicine: but a broken spirit dries the bones.” Social and psychological research is beginning to bear this out.

Psychologists are beginning to take gratitude seriously as a field of research. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, says: “Psychology has generally ignored the positive emotions. We tend to study the things that can go wrong in people’s minds but not the things that can go right. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self.”

Studies are beginning to indicate that people who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others and either to God or to creation in general tend to have higher vitality, more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than the population as a whole. These results hold even when researchers factor out such things as age, health, and income, equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and hearty might have “more to be grateful for.”

Psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, whose specialty is well-being research, says he recently became interested in gratitude when he saw studies suggesting that increasing a person’s sense of thankfulness could lead to lower stress and better life “outcomes,” meaning success in career and relationships. Gratitude isn’t even listed in the 1999 addition of the presumably encyclopedic “Encyclopedia of Human Emotions,” a standard psychology text. “But if a sense of thankfulness can turn someone’s life from bitter to positive,” McAdams notes, “that makes gratitude an important aspect of psychology.”

Gratitude reminds us that there is more going on than just our one life. When we say thanks, as we did last night at our elegant Thanksgiving dinner in this room, thanks for food and drink, for friendship and sustenance, for beauty and for love, we acknowledge that we are part of a web of life, that the Spirit of Life flows through it all. Some call that God, and believe that it is benevolent toward us. For others, it is enough just that Being is so large and powerful and mysterious. That in itself makes it worthy of our awe. A grateful heart keeps us open, so thanks can flow out to those who are working hard, toward those who have offered our gifts, and so we can receive the next thing that is coming. It reminds us that we do not control all of what happens, so we enjoy it while it is here. “He who binds to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity’s sunrise.” (William Blake, 1757 – 1827).

Enlightened travelers of life don’t mourn because joy fades; they smile because it happened. Watch, this Holiday season, for joy to fly around you. I hope it does.

We start by being grateful for things. We move into being grateful in all things. Let me end with the words of Dag Hammarskjšld: To Everything that has been–thanks For Everything that will be–yes.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.